Introducing Aki Oke
An interview with Will Joseph Cook
An interview with Will Joseph Cook discussing his new collaborative project under the name Aki Oke. We talk about creative liberation, Facebook swag, Aki Oke’s first song, CITY IN LOVE (released on Valentine’s Day), and the next expected track, NYC COME GET ME.
Will Joseph Cook is best known in the music world for his “indie guitar pop with biographical lyrics”. He’s an indie pop icon with almost a quarter of a million monthly listeners on Spotify and his most played song, Be Around Me, is at almost 27 million plays. He signed a publishing deal when he was 16, secured his first record deal at 17, and experienced going viral on TikTok with his second album Something to Feel Good About, expanding his listenership to countries and artists around the world. He’s since produced a third album (Every Little Thing) and a mixtape (Novella), supported artists like Tessa Violet on tour, and completed his own headline tour across the US, UK, and EU. In Novella’s “patchwork production” (especially evident in songs like Nobody’s Home) we start to see hints at Will Joseph Cook’s newest project under the name Aki Oke. Aki Oke is a collaborative project that pushes past and mixes multiple music genres, retaining Will’s distinctive sound while blending it with layers that are beat-driven, electronic, and experimental.
Aki Oke is “liberated creatively” from Will Joseph Cook as a brand. From initially working with an indie label, then a major label, then setting up his own label Bad Hotel and producing his last two records independently, Will says Aki Oke “is a way for [him] to find even more independence”. It’s easy for artists to get pigeonholed and for fans to expect them to continue to produce the same types of content. But this can be restrictive: “how do you find anything new or interesting if you don’t start trying to mix your palettes together?” “If I were to put something out in a totally different genre, the algorithm says ‘no’… Ultimately, I needed to have some separation. I’m hoping that rather than trying to slot into an existing genre or type of music, the fans I accumulate are exclusively people who are interested in the experiment”.
Aki Oke is a collaborative project between Will and his brother, also featuring other artists as vocalists. The name Aki comes from a “very sad looking stuffed dog” (“not a taxidermy dog, a toy,” Will is quick to clarify) gifted to his brother by a Japanese student who was a lodger at their family home when they were children. Although the meaning gets slightly obfuscated in translation, Will says Aki in Japanese means something similar to ‘light’ as in enlighten, or to shed light on an idea: “it’s like light from a light bulb in your mind”. Aki can also mean ‘Autumn’. When Will was looking for phonetic sounds to pair with Aki, he thought about Oke, as in karaoke. Karaoke translates to ‘empty orchestra’, making Aki Oke mean something like ‘realisation orchestra’. “I thought that was pretty dope, but at the same time, Aki Oke can also translate to ‘autumn bucket’: I love the idea of it being like a bad tattoo someone got while they were travelling”. The artwork around Aki Oke plays with this: Aki Oke is shown tattooed and also misspelt, adding to the irony.
The era of the aesthetics Aki Oke focuses on are what Will refers to as his “formative years for listening to music”, 2009 to 2012. “I see them as lost years: not quite the indie sleaze that’s currently being celebrated but the next thing that came after that, maybe it’s called ‘FB [Facebook] swag’: a more cringe and online version of the indie sleaze stuff, and the birth of meme culture, Facebook events, and having YouTubers as stars. It’s the aesthetic of people uploading 600 photos from a house party directly to Facebook, including the in-between photos where someone has accidentally hit the flash on a DSLR and it comes out looking like a malfunction of composition”. Will also talks about “the tastelessness of teenage mishmash”: “no-one is coordinated with what they’re wearing and it’s almost anti-fashion stuff. There’s also all this juvenile contradiction where you’re 15 and playing Halo Master Chief but also you’re trying to have a girlfriend or something”. Will thought it would be fun to repopularise and celebrate that era. “My mood boards are my old Facebook photos.”
Panning back to those early teenage years, Aki Oke is in some ways a full circle moment for Will to times when he used to make music with his brother. The music they made at that point was heavily inspired by dubstep and the SoundCloud world. The new collaborative effort is experimental, complemented by the maturity and experience they have now. “The goal with Aki Oke is to blend my indie tastes and references with my more beat driven tastes”, combining hip hop and dance beats with “depth of lyric and feeling that you don’t usually get in dance music”.
The first song under Aki Oke was released on Valentine’s Day (February 14th) 2025 and is called CITY IN LOVE. The lyrics are melancholic – “The city’s fallen in love, I’m just falling in” — reminiscent of a “summertime loneliness track” but the tune itself has “all the trappings of a hedonistic house party song”. The photo shoot for the track shows people kissing and having a great time at a party in the foreground and others sobbing in the background, capturing the “feeling of being left out of something and the melodrama of the ‘forever alone’ teenage feelings”. The cover photo of the song shows vocalist Blu (a.k.a. Lonnie Gunn) holding a diet coke can while crying, her fingers obscuring the letter ‘c’ of ‘Coke’. The photo was taken before Aki Oke was decided on as a name, and only after both the name and photo had been selected did Will notice that the artwork he had chosen contained the word ‘oke’. “It was very strange… a nice bit of fate, or maybe it was something subconscious.”
The city that Will most immediately resonates with when he thinks of CITY IN LOVE is London and beautiful couples lounging in parks like London Fields during summer. He also thinks about New York City and Central Park. The song is “about a heartbreak under attack from everyone else’s love… the idea of taking that personally made me laugh but also felt connected to a bigger theme of perceiving happiness everywhere yet feeling so disconnected from it”. It can be “almost overwhelming how many beautiful, interesting people there are” in such a dense space who seem so happy together and there’s a “juvenile jealousy and feelings of rejection and desperation” that can come with that. Will reflects on the loneliness that might be felt by a previous, more angsty version of himself when he was younger. Despite, or maybe even because of, the sheer number of people in a city, feelings of loneliness can cut to the core.
We see a return to the city theme in the next Aki Oke track Will expects to release, NYC COME GET ME. This track will see Will feature more heavily vocally and is a continuation of CITY IN LOVE and the feeling that “there’s some secret or some key to living your best young hedonistic life filled with happiness, love, and excitement” and that New York encapsulates that promise. The song is overtly satirical and plays on the idea of being willing to “sacrifice everything” and be “alone and broke” in NYC “just to have a glimpse or an attempt at this idea of success or a social media brain rot version of what it means to be young and a socialite and have everything easy and have creative opportunities fall into your lap”. Will says it is “slightly masochistic“: “being alone and broke in New York would be difficult as f*ck”. Nonetheless, there’s something about New York’s appeal that is difficult to shake. Will talks about flying out a few years ago on his birthday and looking out onto the city as the plane was landing. “It was the most clear weather, and I had a window seat and there were crystal blue skies, and it felt like the plane was flying lower than usual and I could see things in high definition. I had this perfect view of the city, and it was my birthday, and I was on a flight on my own with this silly idea of making the next record [Every Single Thing], and I got covered in goosebumps”.
Aki Oke is a thrilling move from Will that will allow him to experiment with creating mixed-genre work that can find new audiences. He’s hoping to learn what is “so addictive” about “unlikely mash-ups” and to touch as many people as possible in the process. Stream CITY IN LOVE. Cry if you want. Dance if you don’t. ∎
Links:
Follow Will Joseph Cook on Spotify and Instagram (@willjosephcook).
Photos provided by Will Joseph Cook.